Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“I won’t try to convert you to the religion of baseball. But it will be a sad day when Allah wipes it from the earth. This, alone, I do not like about jihad.”

“You are a blasphemer,” said Juba. “It is only because you are so negligible that Allah does not punish you. But you have been very good to me, so I forgive you. I will pray for you tonight, and perhaps Allah will extend your time.”

Jared’s phone rang.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Only the mosque has my number, and only for emergencies.”

He took it out, put it to his ear, and listened. Then he returned it to his pocket.

“They caught a spy,” he said. “A woman. Probably FBI. We’d better get back there.”

Dearborn

No heroics, Janet. You understand that?” said Nick Memphis.

“I do.”

She sat in a rented suite of offices in a low-intensity industrial zone just outside of Dearborn, where the MARJORIE DAW working group had rented a building in a warehouse complex by the railroad tracks. All were present, also some technicians and some SWAT officers on loan from the State Police. But they were casually dressed, simply there for the briefing. They wouldn’t go hot until she was in play.

“Mrs. McDowell, can you go over it one more time?” asked Agent Chandler. Chandler, whose cuteness had evolved into serious beauty in the time since she’d worked with Swagger, even if she tried to pretend such a thing could never happen, had been flown in to relate to Mrs. McDowell when all agreed — finally — that Mrs. McDowell was the best option. But it hadn’t been an easy sell for Swagger.

“She’s untrained. You can’t put a civilian in this kind of situation without formal training, and if she slips up, the whole thing goes down,” argued Nick. “On top of that, this is the most highly graded top secret operation we have going. She is not cleared for it and can’t be vetted in time. On top of even that, if the CIA finds out we’re using someone on their nutcase list, they’ll become highly interested, by which I mean irritated, and all sorts of political ramifications could come onto the board that we cannot control.”

Swagger said, “I don’t know nothing about the politics. There shouldn’t be any in this situation, but if there are, let’s pretend there aren’t. It seems to me she can be brought in on the statement that an action against Juba the Sniper is under way, no further details available to her. She will accept that. She wants to be a part of this.”

“You’re not just sentimentalizing things? You’re moved by her, you feel sorry for her — so do I, and who wouldn’t?—but you want to improve her mental health by bringing her in on this and feeling like part of the solution when it is explicitly her amateur status that risks it?”

“Maybe I am. But trying to take my feelings out of it, we’re not sending her in to get the plans for the X11 bomber or to blow up a bridge. She knows mosques, she’s been visiting them for fourteen years. Her job is to determine, as casually as possible, if anything seems out of the ordinary. There are too many mosques, and we do not have enough time to run deeper hunts of each of them. She can save days, maybe weeks, and if we can nail this bird here, think what it’ll mean.”

Gold was agnostic. “I’ve seen cases where passionate amateurs have performed brilliantly. I’ve seen them where they’ve turned triumph into catastrophe. As she’s an American citizen, I will not take a position.”

“These people are not amateurs,” said Nick. “They are ruthless and violent and do not believe that killing an infidel is a sin. We could get this poor woman’s throat cut.”

“We can cover her the whole way,” said Swagger. “Do we need a warrant if an undercover’s life is in jeopardy?”

“Houston?” asked Nick.

The Detroit SAIC answered. “We can get an emergency verbal warrant. It’s rare, but it can happen. But suppose we need it, and the one judge likely to provide it has gone to the movies?”

“It’s too damned dangerous,” Nick said. “And getting a civilian killed could be a bigger scandal than letting Juba proceed. And if we go without it, nothing we acquire will be usable in court.”

“No, but Israel can extradite because of the bus. His number is fixed if we nab him.”

On and on it went, according to the immutable law that the human factor is more responsible for administrative inaction than any failure of policy, plan, or hardware. Finally, the need for speed became the decisive factor. If Juba was here, it wouldn’t be for long.

Nick said, “We have to cover her. Let’s figure out how.”

So Agent Chandler had to make sure Janet was locked in on security.

Janet said, “I check into the Dearborn Holiday Inn tomorrow afternoon under the name Susan Abdullah. My story: I married Saleem Abdullah, an Iraqi psychiatrist, thirty years ago. We lived in Baltimore, Maryland, where he had a private practice. I converted to Islam shortly before the marriage. I learned my pidgin Arabic from him. He was radicalized after nine/eleven. He went to Baghdad in 2012 as a volunteer aid worker for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and was killed in an American air strike. I have come to Dearborn to worship at the big mosque at the American Muslim Center because I’ll never be able to get to Mecca. The big mosque is as close as I can get. I will embrace Dearborn because it is as close to my husband’s native Iraq as I can get. That will be my first mosque. Then I am to enter five mosques, as listed, and attempt to ascertain if anything is subtly amiss. But I am to be strictly observational — no eye contact, no questions, no opening closet doors or going down hallways or trying to get into the basement. Just what I pick up in an informal way. Sewn into the hem of my hijab is a small bead containing a GPS transmitter. If my life should be in danger, I am to crush it through the material. When it stops transmitting, that will be the signal that something is amiss, and the SWAT team, orbiting outside, will hit the mosque under the doctrine of police endangerment.”

“Good, good,” said Chandler.

“Thank you so much for this opportunity,” Mrs. McDowell said. “I know you can’t tell me what this is about, but I presume it’s something important, and I am so pleased to play a part in it.”

Of course, she violated every admonition within minutes. She looked aggressively into the mosques. After ablutions and prayer from the carefully delineated women’s section, she rose and wandered. She tried closets and stairways. She peeked in men’s rooms. She went into offices, recreation centers, basketball courts, weight rooms — all the appurtenances of the modern American house of worship, as much community center as prayer platform. Her hijab made her bold in this world, as it always did. She looked for burly security types, and, with the first four mosques, found none. She asked other women worshippers about changes in mosque operating procedures, or evidence of heavy traffic or other business at night, when all was supposed to be quiet. She wondered if the calls to prayer were on time. She wondered about strange deliveries. In all places, the women were eager to gossip, and she had no problem. The fact that no one paid her any attention she took as the ultimate indication that nothing was amiss or held in secret in each building. Twice she spoke to an imam and found both to be charming, educated men, eager to make conversation with an American convert and sympathetic to the tragic death in Baghdad of Saleem Abdullah, M.D., at American hands.

She came to the last mosque on the list, another domed building with administrative wings off of it. It was far from majestic, but, at the same time, far from shabby. It was no storefront, with an angry young imam in blue jeans and teenagers hanging about, talking of jihad. It looked sedate, unlit, almost slumbering. But even though the last evening prayer was done and darkness was falling on Dearborn, she entered the dim space and quickly noted three women performing ablutions. She joined them and started to chat them up, and it seemed to be going quite well, when one said to her, “Sister, you have many questions.”